New Yankee Stadium to show off immense 103 foot HD scoreboard

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

This spring, fans will be able to walk into the New York Yankee’s new $1.3 billion stadium. And while the roar of the crowd and the thrill of the home run will be the first and foremost experiences to start the flood of the average baseball hound’s adrenal gland, technogeeks will orgiastically fire off their synapses at something else: the center field LED scoreboard.{ad}

Six times larger than the screen at the old Yankee Stadium, the 103-by-58 foot, 1080p HD scoreboard is in actuality a Mitsubishi Diamond Vision LED. It is embedded with 8,601,600 LED lamps, for a total of 5,925 square feet, and like your own HDTV can throw up as many as four simultaneous images, with picture-in-picture capabilities. At that size, the puckered, sweat-oozing pore of your famous pitcher will be the size of a human torso.

But don’t expect that enormous screen to help settle disputed calls. Major League Baseball rules forbid a team from retransmitting any play on a scoreboard that could “incite either team or the fans.”

It’s a curious provision: surely, a disputed call can only incite fans to violence when it is in doubt whether or not the umpire was snorting horse when he made it. Replays ought to make a call’s validity crystal clear. And it’s not like baseball players are soccer hooligans.

That said, an impressive piece of technology, albeit one that blurs the merits of the live game experience at the margins: chances are, if you go to see a Yankee game at the new stadium, you’ll be seeing more of it on television than if you’d stayed and watched it at home.